Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literature

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Stefani Engelstein researches the ways Europeans have understood and classified themselves and others in knowledge-systems that span the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, particularly from 1750-1915, but with an eye on current repercussions. Such categories include race, sex, language family, religion, and species. Her most recent book, Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2017), investigates genealogical sciences in the long nineteenth century which transformed contemporary terms in historical systems – whether languages, religions, races, nations, species, or subjects – into siblings of varying degrees. The sibling is a boundary figure – neither self nor quite other – that enables and yet destabilizes the definition of terms. Professor Engelstein’s first book, Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse(SUNY 2008) explored the contours of the body in surgical, naturalist, aesthetic, and literary texts to trace the transformation of the concept of teleology from an explanation for reproduction and natural equilibrium to a rationalization for legitimating ideologies through the body. She co-edited the anthology, Contemplating Violence: Critical Studies in Modern German Culture (Rodopi 2011) and her work has appeared in such journals as Critical Inquiry, the PMLA, the German Studies Review, the Goethe Yearbook, and Philosophy Today.